Our Work Here Is Done

If Beta Male had a real office with a door (the kind of perk alpha males take for granted), you can bet we would be playing “Don’t You Forget About Me” on a loop right now — and not just because it’s one of our favorite 150 synth-pop ballads of all time, but because this marks the moment when our glorious monthlong moon-shot bid to reinvent the man blog gently touches down somewhere in the South ChinaSea.

Go ahead and shed a tear. It’s perfectly manly to cry — we of all people know that. But Beta Male lived a good, rich life. We had fun. We spoke truths, took risks, reveled in absurdity. We even got shoved in a locker by a prominent feminist website and survived, with our mission and our manhood largelyintact.

We introduced a new term, “benching,” into the vernacular and peeled back the layers of an old one, “alpha male.” We looked back at how Robert Bly kick-started the last great men’s movement. We talked to men excelling in a range of fields, including Army Ranger turned twisted comedy auteur Mat Best, anatomical marvel and lip-sync savant Bryan Hawn, artisanal tobacconist David Sley, and board-certified thirst trap Dr. Mike. And we even found the courage to talk to an actual human woman, one who is utterly slaying it in what was once a man’s world, superstar sportswriter RamonaShelburne.